Davos: Is Emissions Trading the Carbon Solution?
January 31, 2009 | by David Steven | More on What we're watching | No comments
January 31, 2009 | by David Steven | More on What we're watching | No comments
January 31, 2009 | by David Steven | More on Global system | One comment
There were scenes of raw and ghastly panic on the interwebs today as Google went into meltdown and declared every site in the world (including their own) a security risk. Fortunately everything is now OK again, with other ongoing minor problems put firmly into perspective.
(Nouriel Roubini, who just knew this was going to happen, is available for interviews…)
Update: Here’s Google’s explanation of what went wrong. It appears a slip of the hand nearly destroyed the universe.
January 31, 2009 | by David Steven | More on Economics and development | One comment
Considering Nouriel Roubini has so many fans these days, it’s reassuring to know he’s still his biggest one:
January 30, 2009 | by Richard Gowan | More on Influence and networks, North America | No comments
From New York magazine’s blog:
During the election season we heard a lot about “60″ — that magic number of Senate seats that would allow the Democrats to block any filibuster, and, Republicans feared, tax the American people into submission. When all the votes were tallied, they came up just one seat short (assuming Al Franken eventually gets his seat). So close! Reasonably, the Democrats should be able to attract at least one measly Republican to their side, but who wants to even deal with that? Luckily, President Obama has come up with a solution: Fill the empty Commerce Secretary post with Republican New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. As we know, our wonderful system calls for New Hampshire’s Democratic governor to pick Gregg’s successor in such an event, and one would assume he’d choose another Democrat. And voilà, 60!
It’s a clever but slightly crass move — nobody even knows what the Commerce Secretary does anyway, so who cares who’s in there? And Obama will fundamentally alter the balance of power in the Senate in his favor with what appears to be another bipartisan gesture.
January 30, 2009 | by David Steven | More on London Summit, What we're watching | No comments
January 30, 2009 | by David Steven | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system | No comments
Image Author: mike_is_scrumptious
Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.
Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.
Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.
This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.
January 30, 2009 | by David Steven | More on Articles, Articles and Publications | No comments
Climate and cities think piece, co-authored by David Steven and the British Council’s Peter Upton (29 January 2009)
January 30, 2009 | by David Steven | More on What we're watching | No comments
January 30, 2009 | by Alex Evans | More on Influence and networks | No comments
Jeff Jarvis in Davos:
Where’s the plan? I haven’t seen it here.
I’m talking with other people who are getting more depressed as the day goes on and here, I think, is why: We are surrounded by the leaders who fucked it up: bankers, marketeers, regulators, and the press. They were in charge. That’s what Davos is: the people in charge. So who’s to say that we’re going to find the answers in Davos? Well, the people in Davos will. But I think the evidence is strong that the answer is not here.
I’m going skiing.
January 29, 2009 | by David Steven | More on What we're watching | No comments
January 29, 2009 | by David Steven | More on What we're watching | No comments
January 29, 2009 | by Jules Evans | More on Economics and development | One comment
About 10-20%, if you believe the bond markets. Spreads on the debt of southern European sovereigns like Greece, Spain, Portugal and Italy have now widened to record levels over their Northern compatriots’ bonds. These countries all lost their AAA bond rating from Standard & Poor’s earlier this month, which means S&P’s thinks there is a chance, albeit a slim one, that these countries default on their debt.
Some think this could presage the eventual collapse of the eurozone, though others think the rating agencies are getting it wrong again, and see this as a good buying opportunity, such as money managers BlackRock.
“You have got to ask yourself at what point this becomes ridiculous,” Scott Thiel, head of European fixed income in London at BlackRock, which manages $1.3 trillion, said in an interview Jan. 23. “That’s too high if you step back and take a deep breath. We’ve begun to add back exposure” of these bonds.
An interesting question is whether the US could lose its AAA rating. Seeing as the entire credit markets are priced over US Treasuries, this would be a colossal disrupture to bond markets – sort of like the clock at Greenwich stopping.
January 29, 2009 | by Richard Gowan | More on Europe and Central Asia, Off topic | No comments
OK, it’s only NYC East Village Gastropub “EU” – but it makes for a snappy photo:
What went wrong? The original review from New York magazine rings a bell:
The menu at E.U. is a schizophrenic mélange of received trends and styles, centering on European comfort foods. You can get German sausages squeezed into a bun made of fresh pretzel dough, and two styles of Euro burger: the German, topped with liverwurst and bacon, and the Cheddar-and-gravy-smothered English (mine was overdone).
Apply your own similes and metaphors as required.
January 28, 2009 | by David Steven | More on Economics and development | No comments
Courtesy Flickr user massdistraction
The IMF today predicted a grim economic outlook for 2009, with some green shoots in 2010.
The news is especially grim for the UK and Eurozone countries, with a 2.8% and 2% fall in output in 2009 and barely any growth in 2010. The US is predicted to do quite a lot better – a 1.6% fall this year, but 1.6% of growth next. That should cue a pleasant new wave of American triumphalism.
China floats through the crisis more or less unscathed. Growth slips to 6.7% in 2009, but bounces back to 8% in 2010. India does a little worse, Brazil suffers pretty badly, while the Mexican economy really tanks.
But I really don’t know why I even bothered to read the stats. Nine months ago at the Progressive Governance Summit, Dominique Strauss-Kahn told everyone that Europe and the US would experience a slowdown, but not a loss of growth (with the European economy expected to outperform the American one).
Even since it last ran its models in November (just three months ago!), the IMF has knocked 1.7 percentage points off world growth, and a staggering 6 points from its prediction for what were once known as the Asian tigers.
The IMF itself is forced to admit that “the uncertainty surrounding the outlook is unusually large.” Doesn’t that translate as “our models weren’t built for these crazy conditions, but we’ll run them anyway and PR them heavily to the 1000 or so media outlets that’ll reprint our speculation as fact”?
Or am I missing something here?
January 28, 2009 | by Richard Gowan | More on Climate and resource scarcity, Off topic | One comment
Alex has got a good deal of media attention for his excellent new Chatham House report on future of food crises but the Daily Telegraph got the real scoop – by making up a scare story about the death of the Sunday Roast:
Researchers at Chatham House, a think-tank, found that a recent fall in the price of butter, milk and bread was likely to be only a “temporary reprieve”.
The price hikes would hit the price of beef, pork and lamb harder because they are reared on proportionately more grain than “white meat” like chicken.
Alex Evans, the report’s author, said the likely effect would be to make Britons less reliant on beef as a core part of the nation’s diet.
“It will become more expensive,” said Mr Evans. “We are not saying people won’t be able to have a Sunday roast but we will be eating less red meat in future.”
Now, there are some kill-joys who might point out that Alex’s report doesn’t actually mention the Sunday Roast once, but Global Dashboard has an established track-record of commentary in defense of fine British food: check out Evans and Gowan on Bubble, Squeak and eels last July. But the fact that pork prices are set to sky-rocket may explain an American internet phenomenon noted by the NYT today: a BBQ recipe going viral.
This recipe is the Bacon Explosion, modestly called by its inventors “the BBQ Sausage Recipe of all Recipes.” The instructions for constructing this massive torpedo-shaped amalgamation of two pounds of bacon woven through and around two pounds of sausage and slathered in barbecue sauce first appeared last month on the Web site of a team of Kansas City competition barbecuers. They say a diverse collection of well over 16,000 Web sites have linked to the recipe, celebrating, or sometimes scolding, its excessiveness. A fresh audience could be ready to discover it on Super Bowl Sunday.
Where once homegrown recipes were disseminated in Ann Landers columns or Junior League cookbooks, new media have changed — and greatly accelerated — the path to popularity. Few recipes have cruised down this path as fast or as far as the Bacon Explosion, and this turns out to be no accident. One of its inventors works as an Internet marketer, and had a sophisticated understanding of how the latest tools of promotion could be applied to a four-pound roll of pork.
Leaving aside the new media aspect of all this, I’d argue that Americans are wisely stuffing down bacon and sausage before the prices head back up. If you want to make your own Bacon Explosion, the recipe’s here. My own urge to start layering the bacon wrapping was reduced by the discovery that the outcome looks like, well, you know…
For those more interested in making a quick buck than a Bacon Copralite (google it yourself), switch over to Porkworld, Latin America’s leading swine-trade website, which naturally features quotations from one Alex Evans…
URBEINGRECORDED » Discontinuity & Opportunity in a Hyper-Connected World
Great discussion of complexity and network theory and its relevance to global risks, from Chris Arkenberg
The Emissions Gap Report
This publication aims to assess the following questions: are countries’ pledges of action collectively consistent with and, if implemented, likely to achieve the 2˚C and 1.5˚C temperature goals? If not, how big is the gap between emission levels consistent with these temperature goals and the emissions expected as a result of the pledges?
The Spectator runs false sea-level claims on its cover
These claims rely on misinterpretations of scientific data so grave that even an arts graduate such as Fraser Nelson should have been able to spot them.
Europe’s Insult Diplomacy - Infographic
British Prime Minister David Cameron called French President Nicolas Sarkozy “a hidden dwarf” as part of a joke told to a journalist. German Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to Sarkozy as “Mr. Bean,” while Sarkozy called her “La Boche,” or the Kraut. Spanish Prime Minister José Zapatero is “too pink” because of the high proportion of women in his cabinet, said Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. And Berlusconi’s opinion of the euro? “A disaster,” he said, that has “screwed everybody.”
Solar Power's Good News
The White House has challenged the solar industry to produce clean electricity at $1 per watt. It has also set a national goal to achieve 80 percent clean energy use by 2035…The good news is that researchers are racing toward that goal at an impressive rate.
BBC News - Viewpoint: Is the alcohol message all wrong?
"The effects of alcohol on behaviour are determined by cultural rules and norms, not by the chemical actions of ethanol."
Something's Happening Here - NYT - Tom Friedman
When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining
Foreign Aid Set to Take Hit in U.S. Budget Crisis - NYTimes.com
America’s budget crisis at home is forcing the first significant cuts in overseas aid in nearly two decades
Israel - Adrift at Sea Alone - NYTimes.com
Tom Friedman bemoans "the most diplomatically inept and strategically incompetent government in Israel’s history"
Eurozone: A nightmare scenario - FT.com
How it could all go pear-shaped - your cut-out-and-keep flow chart guide
Sharp fall in poor countries' dependency on foreign aid says ActionAid report
Aid dependency among 54 of the world’s poorest countries has declined by a third over the last decade, according to a new report from ActionAid.
World environment programs in budget crosshairs | Reuters
Global conservation programs are prime targets for budget-cutting: they sit at the crossroads of two things Americans dislike spending money on, aid and environment.
Attack of the Superweed - BusinessWeek
widespread use of Roundup has led to the evolution of far-tougher-to-eradicate strains of weeds
Jon Stewart Says Rick Perry Is the Candidate Republicans Want, and Deserve
Laugh out loud funny
Global reach is the prize at Busan - Resources - Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
Jonathan Glennie and Andrew Rogerson on what you need to know ahead of the big aid effectiveness summit
When Bloggers Don’t Follow the Script, to ConAgra’s Chagrin - NYTimes.com
Ha ha ha - epic PR #fail
Obama backs down on tighter smog regulations | World news | The Guardian
In case you missed it. Yes we can...
Wikileaked cable: executions of children by US forces in Iraq
Wikileaked cable with harrowing reports of US forces handcuffing and then killing 10 people - including children aged 5 years, 3 years and 5 months.
BBC News - Tests show fastest way to board passenger planes
The way airlines board planes turns out to be the least efficient
New sources of aid: Charity begins abroad | The Economist
"The establishment donors’ aid monopoly is finished."
Who Doomed Sarah Palin's Presidential Dream? | TPMDC
Where did it all go wrong for Sarah?
The Intergenerational Foundation
"We believe that each generation should pay its own way, which is not happening at present."
Should we have a land value tax? - MoneyWeek
Discussion of pros and cons for the UK, following an article by OECD's chief economist in Prospect
Toward a Post-2015 Development Paradigm | Centre for International Governance Innovation | Centre pour l'innovation dans la gouvernance internationale
12 new development goals are proposed to replace the MDGs from 2015 - the outcome of an IFRC / CIGI conference at Bellagio
China Gets (Needlessly) Defensive Over Famine in Africa - China Real Time Report - WSJ
Germany's Africa policy coordinator causes dispute by singling out Chinese landgrabs as a culprit in the Horn of Africa famine
Latin America: A toxic trade - FT.com
Must read broadside against probably the most stupid and avoidable public policy screw-up in recent memory: the war on drugs
The intellectual collapse of left and right - FT.com
Michael Lind on how the economic inclusion narratives of centre left and centre right are simultaneously imploding - must read
Julia Gillard back to rock-bottom: Newspoll | The Australian
Bad news for supporters of green taxes and decisive action on climate change
Oxfam’s looking for a new Head of Research
A plum role is up for grabs
The global crisis of institutional legitimacy | Felix Salmon
"Our hearts want government to come through and save the economy. But our heads know that it’s not going to happen."
UBS' George Magnus On Marxist Existential Crises And The "Convulsions Of A Political Economy" | ZeroHedge
Not every day you see investment banks publishing detailed analysis of Karl Marx
Food Prices Could Hit Tipping Point for Global Unrest | Wired Science | Wired.com
New quant research on thresholds over which high food prices cause riots
Ambassador Locke Picks Up His Own Coffee, Gains 'Hero' Status Among Chinese : The Two-Way : NPR
Some pictures of the brand new U.S. ambassador to China are causing quite a stir.
Jon Stewart | Ron Paul | Michele Bachmann | Mediaite
Jon Stewart breaks down the state of play on the Republican Presidential race
The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution › When?
Some properly out of the box thinking from Vinay Gupta. Must-read.
England’s riots: If the UK were a fragile state… | Dan Smith's blog
By the head of a leading peacebuilding NGO
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder From 9/11 Still Haunts - NYTimes.com
At least 10,000 New Yorkers still have PTSD from 9/11
The unlikely social network fuelling the Tottenham riots « The Urban Mashup Blog
Not Twitter, not Facebook but.... Blackberry Messenger
Mapping world food price volatility | Nourishing the Planet
Clickable map of global food price hotspots
Will the 2012 Earth Summit be a flop? > From Poverty to Power
Great summary of the state of play on Rio 2012 from Oxfam's Sarah Best
Recent months have seen increasing interest in the idea that Rio+20 could be the launch pad for a new set of ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs). But what would SDGs cover, what would a process to define and then implement them look like, and what would some of the key political challenges be? This short briefing [...]
Any global framework for development which is agreed after 2015 will be a political deal between states. This paper looks at recent trends in policy and politics in emerging economies and traditional donors to assess where a consenus might lie. It suggests some principles for a post-2015 agreement which emerge from recent policy developments
Paper from ODI and UNDP, authored by Claire Melamed and Andy Sumner, summarising the evidence on the impact of the MDGs, and looking at current trends in poverty and in global governance that will affect the shape and the scope of any future agreement on global development.
Why resource scarcity will be a game changer for global justice agendas, and what aid donors, NGOs and other development opinion formers need to do about it. WWF / Oxfam report by Alex Evans.
The Rio 2012 sustainable development summit is at risk of being the latest in a long line of damp squibs on environmental multilateralism – but could still make real progress, if it focuses on greening growth and building resilience to shocks and stresses, and above all faces up to the issues of fair shares that arise in a world of limits.
How national and international governance systems need to be reconfigured to meet the challenges of food security in a world of tighter supply and demand balances and increasing volatility. Report for Oxfam’s new Grow campaign by Alex Evans. (May 2011)
Article on scarcity of resources in Pakistan and what it means for the country.
Text of speech by Alex Evans to Institute for New Economic Thinking annual conference at Bretton Woods; the YouTube video is here. (April 2011) Download Speech
Article published on China Dialogue on reasons for the new food price spike, including potential implications of the current drought in China. (February 2011) Download Article
Eight critical uncertainties for development over the next decade, and ten recommendations for what ActionAid – who commissioned this report – should do to prepare for them
Article published in World Politics Review on current American foreign policy
Report asking how organisations can prosper in what will be a turbulent period for world order
Center on International Cooperation report on what forms of multilateral cooperation are needed to manage scarcity of resources
Background paper on whether resource scarcity and climate change will cause increased violent conflict
Chatham House report on how the UK’s new coalition government should upgrade and reform the way Britain conducts foreign policy
Introductory remarks by David Steven at a Brookings Institution seminar on risk and resilience in the global system (March 2010)
Talk given by David Steven at Gresham College on risk and resilience in the UK housing market, as part of a Long Finance Roundtable meeting (March 2010)
Report by David Steven in response to the FSA’s Mortgage Market Review
Brookings Institution report by Alex Evans, Bruce Jones and David Steven on how globalisation could fail – and how it could be made more resilient. Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary World Economic Forum in Davos.
Report by Alex Evans and David Steven analysing the post-Copenhagen context on climate change, including a proposed 12 point action plan. Written for the Brookings Institution / NYU Center on International Cooperation Managing Global Insecurity programme.
World Food Programme report on the state of the science on what climate change means for hunger, plus policy recommendations. Authored by IPCC Impacts Chair Martin Parry with Mark Rosengrant, Tim Wheeler and Global Dashboard’s Alex Evans (December 2009)
Presentation by Alex Evans to a seminar organised for the UN Department of Political Affairs by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (August 2009)
Article on risk and resilience by Alex Evans and David Steven – part of a special in World Politics Review on risk and resilience in a globalized age (July 2009)
Report by Alex Evans and David Steven exploring the future international institutional requirements for managing climate change, and including three scenarios for climate institutions between now and 2030. Commissioned by the UK Department for International Development. (May 2009)
Article by Alex Evans and David Steven exploring resilience as a political agenda – part of a special edition of Renewal on the transformation of foreign policy (February 2009)
Climate and cities think piece, co-authored by David Steven and the British Council’s Peter Upton (29 January 2009)
Chatham House pamphlet by Alex Evans on how scarcity issues will shape the outlook for global food production, and the actions that policymakers need to take at the international level and in developing countries to ensure food security in the 21st century
Paper by David Steven, presented to “Reforming International Institutions – Meeting the Challenges of the 21st Century,” a conference organized by the United Nations University and the British Embassy in Tokyo (Jan 2009).
Speech by Alex Evans at the Tomorrow Network (25 November 2008)
Paper by Alex Evans and David Steven on financial reform and wider multilateralism, published ahead of the G20 ‘Bretton Woods II’ Summit (November 2008).
Speech by David Steven to RUSI Conference on UK Resilience (8 October 2008)
Chapter by Alex Evans and David Steven in the Foreign & Commonwealth Office publication, ‘Engagement: public diplomacy in a globalised world’ (July 2008). Download Chapter
Draft report by Alex Evans exploring multilateral system reforms needed in order to manage resource scarcity issues more effectively. The final version will be published in early 2010 (July 2008)
Speech by Alex Evans at UK Parliament (8 July 2008)
Speech by David Steven at the UNU G8 Symposium (4 July 2008)
Speech by Alex Evans to United Nations Association UK (7 June 2008)
Speech by David Steven to the UK Defence Academy’s Advanced Research and Assessment Group seminar on Strategic Communications, Public Diplomacy and Afghanistan (4 June 2008).
Speech by David Steven to the University of Westminster Symposium on Transformational Public Diplomacy (30 April 2008).
Briefing paper by Alex Evans, published through Chatham House’s food programme (April 2008).
Speech by David Steven to RUSI Conference on Critical National Infrastructure (16 April 2008).
Paper by Alex Evans and David Steven, commissioned by Gordon Brown and presented to heads of state at the Progressive Governance Summit (April 2008).
Chapter by Alex Evans and David Steven, as part of the British Council’s Transatlantic Network 2020 book ‘Talking Trans-Atlantic’ (March 2008).
Article by Alex Evans for the Environmental Policy & Law Journal (January 2008).
Report by Alex Evans and David Steven, written for the London Accord (December 2007).
New paper by Alex Evans on climate policy after 2012 from the Center on International Cooperation (October 2007).
Chapter on the FCO from Manchester University Press’s Alternative Comprehensive Spending Review, by David Steven (September 2007).
Note by Alex Evans and David Steven about how to restructure the UK’s foreign policy system in order to manage trans-boundary global risks better (April 2007).
Talk given by David Steven at the Wilton Park conference: The Future of Public Diplomacy. Focuses on strategies to drive public diplomacy to the heart of the foreign policy armoury (March 2007).
It’s interesting to look back a few years – to when the world was worried that food was too cheap, not too expensive. In 2004, the UN Food and Agricultural Organization looked back on a long bear market for food: forty years in which real prices of agricultural commodities had fallen 2% per year, or [...]
How many people are hungry?3The good news: poverty is in retreat. The bad news: hunger isn’t. That’s the headline finding for the first Millennium Development Goal , which aims to halve the proportion of people living on less than $1.25 a day and the proportion of people living in hunger between 1990 and 2015. Great strides have been made [...]
“Freeing the entire human race from want”2The MDGs are so over Having just been rude about one World Bank report, here’s a positive review of another – the Global Monitoring Report 2011, which the Bank produces jointly with the IMF. The GMR updates progress against the Millennium Development Goals – targets that were set as the culmination of a push throughout [...]
21 years ahead of its time5A 1989 article on ‘the global teenager’ in Whole Earth Review was way ahead of its time in identifying the crux of what today’s youth bulge means for global change
Is it time for Sustainable Development Goals?4The pros and cons of a new global set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) – and how they might work in practice
The one book you must read over the summer9Mark Lynas’s new book The God Species is a must-read for environmentalists
Fair shares in a world of limits: the new front line for development-Thoughts after from a joint WWF / Oxfam seminar on resource scarcity, fair shares and development.
What the ‘powershift’ narrative overlooks on US-China relations-The ‘powershift’ narrative about US-China relations obscures how much they have in common: unsustainable growth paths, shaky financial sectors, political sclerosis, massive inequality, reliance on imported resources and above all their status as the two principal obstacles to collective action on shared global risks.
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